The Midnight Library
A fantasy story about the life we would choose if we had infinite alternatives. Though it glosses over the grotesqueness of its subject matter (the main character's depression and attempted suicide), it explores philosophical concepts and offers meaningful food for thought.
Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, an orphan living alone in a small town outside of London. She loses her job, her cat gets run over by a car, and her brother blows her off while in town. She considers her life a series of missed opportunities and decides that it is not worth living.
After downing a bottle of pills, Nora hovers somewhere in between life and death in The Midnight Library, which holds an infinite number of books, each representing a different life Nora might have lived had she not made one of the choices in her hefty “book of regrets”. Nora is able to enter her various lives and decide which she likes best.
Like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, this book uses a magical construct to make philosophical points - like be careful what you wish for, and a positive outlook is more essential to happiness than fame or material success.
The book is satisfying in the predictable way of a fable. It was fun. The author took the full liberty of fiction to craft a main character who has tremendous talent and unusual potential – making her alternate lives entertaining, though unrealistic for the average person. I found myself wondering how this book would have worked if it were written about the more common victims of suicide in our society – for example, middle aged men addicted to opioids - rather than a cute, youngish woman with unusual talent who fell on hard times. That would have been a much tougher book to write well, but it probably would have said something more realistic about depression.
All that being said, this book surprised me by staying with me after I finished it. It raised a question about how much agency any of us really has over our destiny. I’m not sure I agree with the author’s answer, but it was palatable food for thought.